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I understand politically that uprisings take place as a combination of spontaneity and preparation, not that preparation is more important than spontaneity.

Vijay Prashad

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Vijay Prashad
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 14
Historian
Writer
Calcutta
Understand
Place
Take
Uprisings
Important
Uprising
Spontaneity
Politically
Preparation
Combination

More quotes by Vijay Prashad

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Interestingly, if you write preparation out of history, leadership and preparation, the building of confidence among people who are exploited, you've actually methodologically written out the Communists because, when an uprising takes place, you don't necessarily see red flags everywhere.
Vijay Prashad
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The best intentions (of respect and tolerance) can often be annoying to those whose cultures are not in dominance: we feel that we are often zoological specimens.
Vijay Prashad
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You see all kinds of anarchic forms of rebellion, but the moment of preparation is when the Communists and other kinds of political forces play a roll.
Vijay Prashad
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Turkey is using the Islamic State in the same way as Pakistan used the Taliban in Afghanistan. You know, that's perhaps Turkey's strategy.
Vijay Prashad
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The Chinese did after all decide that the Soviet Union was a greater threat than the United States and decided to come to terms with the United States when Nixon visits China.
Vijay Prashad
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You cannot have politics without building mass-movements.
Vijay Prashad
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Mr. Obama needs to make a phone call to Ankara and have a serious conversation about why the current government in Turkey isn't going to seal its border, why it doesn't take a stronger position against the Islamic State.
Vijay Prashad
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To be a Communist or to be somebody who believes in the future is a curious thing. So you have to live with people around you, you have to be with the people.
Vijay Prashad
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From 1991 till the present, Iraq sovereignty has been trampled by the United States.
Vijay Prashad
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All evidence suggests that Turkey has allowed ISIS fighters, when they've been injured, to return into Turkey and to get treated in Turkey's hospitals.
Vijay Prashad
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People who become important activists, they also struggle with the process of discovery.
Vijay Prashad
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It is convenient for Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair to say the rise of the Islamic State has nothing to do with the Iraq War because that takes the culpability off their shoulders. The Islamic State is a product of the Iraq War. It took about a 100 years to build the Iraqi state, and the Americans and the British destroyed it in an afternoon.
Vijay Prashad
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It's Israelis who are ready to abandon the hard work of peace.
Vijay Prashad
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Over the last two or so decades, there's been an increase in thinking among the Left, liberals, intellectuals in the direction of so-called spontaneity. In other words that uprisings happen spontaneously, people are frustrated, angry, then they spontaneously rise up. And what they don't require is preparation, or what we used to call leadership.
Vijay Prashad
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Where there is a living memory of struggle, they have a living memory of the rebellion. Where there's no struggle afterward the rebellion is forgotten.
Vijay Prashad
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The Islamic State is able to raise finances through taxation, through theft of banks, and certainly through oil sales from the Omar oilfields in eastern Syria. So right now the question of funding isn't of the essence.
Vijay Prashad
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It's plain that the American right wing, the Republicans and some sections of the Democratic Party, don't really care about international norms. They believe in the executive authority of the president. They don't even believe the United Nations or international law should play any role vis-à-vis American policymaking.
Vijay Prashad
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There are cultures that produce different kinds of attitudes, whether it's religion, fatalism, sense of fear, repression, the culture of God and the police minimizes confidence in people.
Vijay Prashad
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Leadership is another word for preparation.
Vijay Prashad
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I think a far more important strategic way to deal with the Islamic State would be to bring some of these regional partners and explain to them that Turkey's own contradictory foreign policy has to end. I mean, if United States is serious, it has leverage over Turkey. And apparently it has not been able to move Turkey sufficiently.
Vijay Prashad